Opinions

John Damianos graduated from Dartmouth College in 2016, majoring in linguistics modified with neuroscience and minoring in French. While at Dartmouth, he did a lot of work in substance abuse counseling, and became interested in behavior change through tools like Motivational Interviewing. He is now a member of the class of 2020 at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine. He is a Medical Education Scholar and completed a Pano T. Rodis Fellowship in Compassionate Medical Care. Greek by heritage and a linguist by training, he particularly enjoys anatomy and dissecting not only the body but also the names of structures therein.

To culminate a year rife with political turmoil, one final wildfire swept the nation at the close of 2017. After initial reports from inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggesting that it had received instruction to forbid the usage of seven words in its budget formulations, media outlets and the general public took en masse to declare a state of Orwellian emergency.

Perhaps the most damaging legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency so far has been the fake news phenomenon. When Trump at one of his first press conference as president-elect pointed at a CNN journalist and said, “You are fake news,” he was doing a lot more than complaining about a media highly critical of him.

Physicians are expected to understand and apply research in order to provide their patients with the best available care. To meet this growing demand, there has been an increase in the number of physician-scientists in biomedical research.

Conducting research in vulnerable populations and historically marginalized groups can be a delicate process, and because of this, safeguards intended to protect these exact groups can ultimately hinder the research process.

Imagine this: You’re trying to secure that bank loan to start your dream business and everything is working out just right, until the very last minute when you learn of a hard requirement that disqualifies you from securing your loan.

Like our casual life, medicine seems to be affected by social media, quick information exchange and so-called “influencers.” Gluten intolerance, chronic Lyme disease and fibromyalgia are common diseases that can be researched on the internet.

In an era where climate change has been variously described as ‘the great moral challenge of our generation’ to ‘absolute crap,’ it seems pertinent as future health professionals to have a look at the evidence and ask ourselves how this issue might come to affect the health of our prospective patients.

“Military Medicine” would be grossly incomplete without a physician’s input, particularly one who spends so much time with veterans. I asked Eric Young, MD, a hospitalist at the Denver Veterans Administration (VA), for his perspectives on service, medicine, their intersection and the greatest opportunities for medical students.

The Veterans Administration (VA) is as indelible and resilient as the patients it serves. The service has changed, succeeded beyond belief and otherwise trudged along to the present. As a preclinical medical student, one hears all kinds of things about “this one VA patient,” without any context, and it piques curiosity.

In honor of Veterans Day, the in-Training staff would like to dedicate a few pieces in “Military Medicine” to the Veterans Administration (VA), an institution entrusted with serving those who served us. This article is a primer, perhaps more correctly a gross oversimplification, of the history of veterans’ health care in the United States.

Vaidehi Mujumdar is a medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine. An alumna of Dartmouth College, her writing has been published in The Guardian, The Almost Doctors Channel, The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, India.com US Edition, Media Diversified, and others. Follow her on Twitter @VeeMuj.

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in-Training is the agora of the medical student community, the intellectual center for news, commentary, and the free expression of the medical student voice. We publish articles about humanism in medicine, patient stories, medical education, the medical school experience, health policy, medical ethics, art and literature in medicine, and much more.